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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RDM who wrote (57452)	5/6/1999 5:17:00 PM
From: Saturn V	Respond to of 1583516

Ref- " But if history were written on the basis of technical innovation, National Semi's 32032 chip would have been one of the big, big winners. When Intel was fooling around with such dead-end products as the 80286, National was jumping way ahead with more far-seeing, more innovative products. " Alas the NS32032 was architecturally the best 32-bit processor introduced in the early 80's. And it was the first to market. [Intel 432 was first, but was an abortion and died an early painless death.]. So conventional wisdom says that National should have been the winner of the microprocessor sweepstakes, and not the klugy and late Intel x86. Why have we come to this ? A brief look at history is order. NS32000 family was widely accepted as the most elegant 32-bit architecture, and years ahead of its competitors. Several companies were founded to use this super chip to build the best workstations. Unfortunately the silicon implementation was not clean enough to build systems, and write enough software for the NS32000. It took years for National Semi to clean up the design. So its potential customers either went bankrupt, or switched to the slower and less elegant 16-bit 68000 from Motorola. When National finally cleaned up the design, the Motorola's 32-bit chip 68020 was ready, and the software from the Motorola 68000 was immediately ported to 68020, and with no software base, the NS32000 got locked out of the workstation market. The 68000 family remained the king of the workstation market for less than a decade. Under relentless pressure from the more cost-effective Intel 386 and its progeny, the workstation makers jettisoned the 68000 in favor of the new "RISC" technology and survived for a while. However under continued pressure from X86, the RISC manufacturers continue to dwindle. The Intel X86 juggernaut continues its inexorable progress! And who will be the next victim ??